Weekend Edition
October 29 - 31, 2010
The War That Dares Not Speak Its Name
Class War in America
By DAVID ROSEN
The great unspoken two words of American political discourse are class war. The moral and political premise of the modern, post-World War II “American Century” is that the U.S. had overcome class divisions and struggle. Everyone, or nearly everyone save the very poor and the very, very rich, was absorbed into a vast, undifferentiated middle class.
The fiction that America is a nation without class, a lie since its inception a half-century ago, gets more and more untenable as actual class struggle daily intensifies. It’s time to accept the simple yet profound fact that America is in the midst of class war –and the super-rich, the American sector of the global oligarchy, is winning.
Class struggle is being explicitly fought out in France and Britain. In France, it is expressed as mass and often-violent resistance, with blood on the streets. In the U.K., it’s being imposed as a ruling class demand for austerity through huge public-sector layoffs, cuts in public services and little overt resistance.
In Germany and the U.S., the mediating lubricants of legal niceties and political parties continue to contain and blunt direct class conflict. Class and class war were forcefully suppressed during World War II and effectively disappeared with the integration of union labor and Taft-Hartley legislation following the war. The domestic program of prosperity and anti-communist McCarthyism combined with a foreign campaign of Cold War military intervention and Marshall Plan economic renewal served as a two-pronged bulwark for a revitalized capitalist order.
It is time for Americans to reclaim the concept of class war. This needs to be done for two reasons: first, to actively combat the great squeeze ruining the lives of untold millions of Americans faced with financial catastrophe; and, second, to end the campaign by the super-rich (in league with government tax policies, subsidies and other give-aways) and the media to keep alive the fiction of America is a classless society free of class war.
Please read the full article at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/rosen10292010.html
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